In the late 1980s author Andre Dubus, the great vivisectionist of the American family and community, wrote a brilliant short story called Killings, about the horrendous grief endured by a small-town ice-cream store owner and his wife after the murder of their 21-year-old son.

Around the same time, Todd Field, aka William Field, then a 25-year-old from Oregon testing the acting waters in New York, suffered a terrible tragedy. "I lost a young woman friend in a very violent way, and went through three years of grief," says Field, now 37. Dubus's story struck him to the core, and he decided to adapt and direct it for the screen. In the Bedroom, Field's debut feature, came to fruition more than a decade later - two years after Dubus's death in 1999 - and won the grand jury prize at last year's Sundance film festival.

It is a finely detailed, gently unravelling melodrama, in which Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek star as the parents of an only child (Nick Stahl) bound for postgraduate studies, whose affair with the wife of a jealous sociopath culminates in the boy's murder. The film's focus is the effect of this act on the parents.

"Grief is a frozen state for men and for women, but men can be harder to understand, because we don't like to articulate our feelings," says Field. "Matt Fowler [Wilkinson] gets solace from his friends, but he's still alone. And his wife, Ruth [Spacek], totally isolates herself, which is a flip from what is normally the case. She doesn't have anyone."

Field says that the film is true to the spirit of Dubus's tale. But he has significantly raised Ruth's profile. "In Andre's story she's in the background until towards the end," he says. "I told Andre when we first met that what I was interested in was that woman, that marriage." While the seams of Matt and Ruth's relationship begin to fray, a second act of violence, one of revenge, begins to take shape. "You conjure up this picture of a frail woman back at home, a silent suffering victim," Field continues. "I said to Andre, 'I think it's the Scottish play.' He said that's what he was thinking of when he wrote it. At the end, you feel that it's Ruth who is the one who's been at work. Matt is not operating alone. Someone else is driving it. And you begin to realise that Ruth isn't the one who is devastated; Matt is."

Dubus is but one of Field's mentors. If the writer provided Field with a moral and psychological framework, two directors for whom he has acted - indie film-maker Victor Nunez and Stanley Kubrick - helped teach him how to make a personal film.

Field found their approaches similar. "They collaborated with their actors. They both used only one or two angles. They did such long takes because they figured that the performers would have more of a relationship with the audience if they weren't shot to shreds. Both had small crews. And both were humble, secure enough not to go around posturing." Of Nunez, for whom he played Ashley Judd's rustic love interest in Ruby in Paradise (1993), he says: "He asks questions of you, talking about the character's history in a way I hadn't encountered since acting school. He doesn't judge his characters. He loves them all." And of Kubrick, for whom he played the pianist Nick Nightingale in Eyes Wide Shut: "He said you'd better be really crazy about something before you embark upon it. And that thing that does excite you, you probably don't want to talk about it very much. You've got to hold something back for yourself, otherwise it will become drudgery. If you tell them everything, you have nothing left for yourself."

Field, whose parents were Milwaukee storekeepers, started out as a trombonist. "By the time I was 16, I was doing the odd jingle and commercial work in studios, and playing in a jazz group in Portland," he says. He was crushed when he failed to get into Indiana University's music department to study with the trombonist David Baker, so he ended up going to tiny Southern Oregon State on a music scholarship. There he met a girl in the theatre department, and kept following her into that section. One day he saw a note on the board there for a student directing project, and volunteered to act in it. "There was a girl blocking out this Brechtian thing!" he says, with a sarcastic edge. "I ended up directing as much as she did. It was a huge success, and I changed majors. I directed works by Aristophanes and Turgenev. One of my teachers gave me some names and told me to go to New York, and I did." After doing a couple of plays, working odd jobs, sleeping occasionally in Penn Station and on friends' couches, and landing a bit part in Woody Allen's Radio Days, he went to Los Angeles.

"I just knew you didn't go to LA until somebody flies you there, but I went anyway. Nobody wants to be near you. They're afraid it will rub off on them that you are not a whatever."

His hunch was right: Los Angeles proved frustrating, so he headed to Montreal to visit a friend, and ended up landing the part of a Swedish goalkeeper in a Canadian TV show. Just as he was about to open Montreal's first Mexican restaurant, he got a call from an agent in LA, asking him to come down for an audition. "I didn't get the part, but I did find myself sitting in the Palm Restaurant across from a young woman from New York who told me that if I wanted to act in films, I should remain in LA."

The young woman, Serena Rathbun, became Field's wife. They settled down in Los Angeles before moving to Maine. The cottage where they live with their three children, the oldest of whom is 13, is the cabin in which Matt and his pal Willis hatch their revenge scheme. "Those are my woods," Field says. "They go all the way down to the water. My closest neighbours are a mile away, but I know them better than any neighbours I've had in my whole life. This is my community."